Leadership has been defined as the power of one or a few individuals to induce a group to adopt a particular line of policy. Leadership has always fascinated the general public as well as observers of political life because of the element of “miracle” which seems embedded in the phenomenon. It appears to belong to the realm of the divine, of the sacred as it creates a bond between rulers and ruled which defies ordinary explanations. Not surprisingly, therefore, leadership has proved difficult to measure and to assess; works on the subject have tended to be descriptions of the deeds of heroes rather than careful analyses of the subject.
Part of the difficulty comes from the fact that the qualities required of a leader are hard to define. Social psychologists and psychologists, who more than other academics have attempted to analyze the phenomenon and who have set up experiments designed to detect the components of leadership, have found it difficult to agree as to which personality characteristics are most important. Many “traits” are felt to be essential, from energy to intelligence and from the ability to communicate to the capacity to make decisions rapidly and firmly. The results so far do not provide a clear outline of what is or is not required, any more than the biographies of “illustrious” men have made it possible to determine what exactly were the qualities of Alexander or Caesar, Napoleon or Churchill.
One reason why the personal qualities required of a leader should be diverse is because leadership cannot be divorced from the environment within which it occurs. The role of this environment is manifest in several ways. To begin with, the personal qualities of leaders are personal only in the sense that these leaders happen to possess them: they may also be viewed as being in part the product of the environment, from the family in which the leaders grew up to the nation to which they belong. But there are two other essential ways in which leadership is related to and indeed depends on the environment. First, leadership is, usually at least, clearly connected to the holding of a particular position: a prime minister may exercise his or her leadership more or less successfully; in the first instance, however, the fact of being prime minister provides opportunities which others do not have. The holder of such a post is expected to be a leader; other politicians and the population as a whole look to the head of the government for guidance. What needs explanation is more why some prime ministers or presidents do not succeed in becoming real leaders, rather than why they succeed in doing so. Indeed, more generally, the institutional framework truly fashions the characteristics of leadership in that it provides opportunities to exercise power: the British prime minister, for example, has an easier task in this respect than the Italian prime minister, who heads a coalition government whose many components are more likely to rebel than to follow.
There is, however, a second and even more fundamental way in which the environment appears to condition or even mould leadership: the circumstances are not equally advantageous to all those who hold top positions. Of course, a “real” leader is the one who can seize the opportunities and exploit them to the full; but the opportunities may be rare. Some leaders may benefit from the disunion of their enemies at home and abroad; others may benefit from the fact that external circumstances are favorable. Indeed, it is in the context of foreign affairs that the characteristics of leadership have tended to emerge most strongly, in part because foreign affairs have always been more glamorous than internal policy making and in part because, the stakes being much higher, up to and including the destruction of the country, the successes can be immense. Machiavelli knew this well: most of his recommendations to the Prince were connected to the aim of establishing leadership through prestigious victories against foreign enemies. Closer to our own day, one wonders how Winston Churchill would have fared — indeed whether he would still play a part in the history books, despite having been minister several times — had he not “met with destiny” in 1940; the same might be said of Charles de Gaulle, as a result of the brutal French defeat of the same year.
Not unnaturally, psychologists and others have come increasingly to note that the qualities required of leaders cannot be defined in the abstract; they must, on the contrary, be related to the circumstances in which the leader emerges. Leaders and their environment are so closely related that the question of the assessment of their role has become extremely difficult to undertake. Here too, biographies have described the achievements of large numbers of great rulers but are of little help in answering the question: how have leaders changed the course of history? The question has become the subject of a major debate between those who emphasize “heroes” and those who interpret the past on the basis of broad economic and social trends in which leaders are mere symbols.
So far there has been no definite answer to the question and none is likely to be given in the near future. Attempts to compare different situations and assess how much of the variations could be attributed to leaders have occasionally been made. Even if the efforts are not wholly convincing they make the case of those who suggest that leaders merely reflect their environment more difficult to sustain: it goes against common sense; it goes against the way people have always behaved, not least those who have professed that the environment was all powerful. It is the political regimes that are most closely built on this philosophy, the communist systems, that produce the politicians who place most emphasis on leadership as though the socioeconomic forces needed Lenin, Mao, Tito and others to materialize themselves in the reality of political life.
It seems reasonable to continue to assume that leaders play a major part in determining political actions though it is also reasonable to believe that this part is larger in some circumstances than in others and especially small at times of crisis or when a new country is created. This is probably why the strongest form of leadership, described as “charismatic,” often disappeared during the post second-world-war period, when dozens of states became independent and many others underwent revolutions.
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